Horse Race Reporting is Stressful Bullshit
Freaking out over the unknown is not good especially when we are led to freak out...
I’m going to tell you how a horse race works, a real horse race, one run with real horses not people. I’m going to reference flat racing, because that is the style of horse-racing we see most often. In flat racing, two or more horses like up at point A, the start of the race, usually referred to as the starting gate. Atop the horse is a jockey, a smallish usually-but-not-always man who commands, guides, cajoles the horse to get to point B as fast as possible and before the competition gets there. What happens between points A and points B, after the horses have been signaled to start, is the horse race. Who crosses the finishing line first is the winner of the horse race. And that is that.
The most famous horse race in the United States is the Kentucky Derby. The Derby is usually run on the first Saturday of May and involves the sport’s top three-year old thoroughbreds. The race is held on a mile-and-a-quarter track, which most horses complete in about two minutes. The fancy hats, seersucker suits, parasols, and mint julips, none of those things are the horse race. Neither is what happens behind the scenes before the race starts.
There’s a lot that goes into preparation for a horse race. Technically, prep for a horse race starts with breeding. The sport’s biggest freaks and richest players spend a lot of money studying the genetics of the horses they acquire, making sure that the genetic lineage of their horses is theoretically the best. But its not just the genes that stables look for. Size, weight, leg length, gait, temperament are a few other things breeders and stables measure.
Once a horse is acquired for the track, it must be trained. I’m not going to pretend that I know much about training other than it takes time, expertise, and money. And that training a horse to race and a horse and jockey to run a race together is much like training for most things. It involves identifying strengths and weaknesses, building on the strengths while deemphasizing weaknesses, and constantly adjusting as the relationship to strength and weakness changes. There’s finding exercises and drills that work and repeating them a lot. There’s coaching and conditioning, physical therapy and recovery, and sometimes “extracurricular” activity, i.e. cheating.
Once a horse and jockey are ready to race, there’s time trials, qualifying trials, and before that getting to the race, which can be a difficult logistical challenge. Then there’s all the official stuff that occurs in the few days before the race, basically testing and ceremony. And once race day arrives and everything is ready, the trainers lead the horses and the jockeys to the starting gate, where they line up and await the gunshot that signals that the race is on. Again, until that gun is fired, no race has begun.
There are two kinds of ways to play the ponies. The first is what most of us do when we bet at the track: Look at the names of the horses, maybe look at the picture of a horse, see what the jockey is wearing, and then pick what you like best. Those who pretend to know more than we know, look at the horse’s history as provided to us by the race program, but we don’t really know what we are looking for.
The true gamblers operate on a much deeper level. They look at the race program and the Daily Racing Form, a publication that covers horse racing in minutia. This is where betters will find information on the past performance of a horse, jockey, trainer, and stable. You can see a horse and jockey’s history with a track and/or race, as well as how it runs against certain horses. Then there’s all the physical information on the horse, the size, weight, length, lineage, etc. If you want to dig further, you can find how Stupid Nightmare did at Hungry Fields in the heat and humidity of July, while running against Moron’s Mom. And then you can plug all that you discovered into your system, if you have one. None of this is the horse race.
We read a lot about “horse race reporting” on politics. The phrase is a near misnomer. Our political journalists report on political campaigns and elections as if they are a horse race, but there’s one crucial thing missing: A concrete way to measure the progress of the race.
Remember that everything that comes before the shot is fired at the starting gate is not the horse race. It is what is done to prepare for the race. All the information provided in programs and in the Daily Racing Form is not the horse race. Same goes with a candidate’s past performance, how much money they are raising, who has endorsed them, and how many people that they draw to rallies -crucial stuff that contributes to success or failure, but not the race.
Before the main event, a horse must qualify for the race, so qualifying races and/or time trials are held. These things are important and do determine who races on the big day, but a lot of things can happen between qualifiers and the marque race, including disqualifications, injuries, and death. Same goes with a party primary in an election season. While the primaries are contests, they are not the main event. The information we glean from the primaries are as helpful to us as the stats on a horse’s past performance are to someone playing the ponies, but that’s it.
With an election, specifically a presidential election, the race starts once the main candidates are officially chosen and declared, and this is when the horse race analogy falls apart. In a horse race, the starter’s gun is fired, horses bolt from the gate, and we see exactly how each horse is running right until the very end. Every bit of progress is right there for us to see. We can measure that progress in real time. After one-thousand feet, we know who is in the lead. At a half-mile, we know how all the horses are doing. At the three-quarters mark, we can identify who is in first, second, third, etc. And that is the way it goes up until the first nose hits the finishing line and then we know for sure who won.
If a presidential election is a horse race this is how we experience it: We see the lead up to the race. We know the names and history of all the horses and jockeys. The more savvy among us knows who the background players are and their pet strategies and tactics. We see the candidates get led to the gate and hear the starter’s gun fire…and then the track becomes locked in a fog. We know the candidates are there, we can see and hear them, but we don’t know where they are in the race, not for sure, not unless one of them has collapsed on the track, but even then…
What we do know is that there are hundreds and thousands of people telling us what they think they know, even though they are looking at the same race we are. They have their Daily Racing Form, of sorts, in political polls, polls that are as useful in predicting the outcome of an election as the Form is pegging the winner and losers of a horse race (not so much). But no one telling us what they know knows any more than what we know which is not much at all.
We know that both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are running for president and that both candidates control a solid base of voters. We have a rough idea of how many people are in these bases, but not how they correspond to votes, the one concrete thing that determines who wins the contest. We will not know how people voted, how many people voted, or if they voted for sure until the candidates crossed the finish line, and even then, it will take time to count the votes and determine who won.
When you go to the track and bet on a horse, there’s a lot of emotions you feel while the race is being run. Those emotions are rooted in what is happening on the track, progress that you can see in real time. In an election where we have something big at stake, we also feel a lot of emotions, but unlike what we experience with a horse race, we are reacting to both unknowns and what others who are just as blanked as us tell us what they think is happening and who will win the race.
When we freak out over an election, we are freaking out over the unknown. That is the case when we are freaking out in July or August or today less than a week away from election day. We are still in the unknown, yet we are constantly bombarded with “horse race reporting” on the unknown and unknowable. Stop.
Look over your voting material, fill out your ballot, vote, and step away. If you can’t distance yourself, break from the scene, ditch the doom scrolling, and do something constructive. Call your local party HQ or voting rights group and ask what you can do to volunteer. That might be as a poll watcher or driving snacks to other volunteers or getting people to voting places. Do things that will help achieve the election result that you want. But, whatever you do, step away and ignore the reporting and the polls until the final ballot is cast.